Watched the second part of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”.

Like part 1, it is very enjoyable. The themes are all up my alley, although I didn’t really seem to pick up on an overarching thread as much in this part. Struggling to piece it together into something coherent in my head. I guess it had less well-known characters to wrap a story around.

Let’s see – it was linking together ecosystems, cybernetics, counterculture communes, the Club of Rome’s take on tackling climate change, and some of the revolutions in the first decade of the 2000s where social media was kindling.

I think the main gist of the argument was against the ideas from systems theory and cybernetics that either nature or society have a tendency to self-regulate and self-stabilise. He seemed to be making the point that all attempts at a kind of social homeostasis are doomed to failure, because it’s based on flawed thinking, and that it doesn’t translate from machines to societies.

I think he probably strawmans cybernetics a bit for his own ends there, but I suppose machine control makes for a good boogieman. He also seemed to be saying that hiearchy creeps in, however horizontal and interconnected you try to make your structure, so you shouldn’t bother trying a flat structure. Again, I don’t think total flatness is really how cybernetics presents systems theory though (although I don’t know a lot about cybernetics to be fair.)

I found it really interesting when talking about the Club of Rome and limits to growth. Apparently the idea of stopping growth and finding ‘a natural balance’ (in an attempt to curtail climate catastrophe) was protested at the time as being akin to Jan Smuts’ ‘holism’ – a disingenuous and racist way to maintain a currently unequal system. I guess the protestors weren’t championing growth, though – presumably they wanted a complete system change altogether.

The suggestion that the ideas of the balance of nature and ecosystems thinking is all bunk, is all new to me. That's really interesting. I've fairly unthinkingly bought into a strain of thought that we are affecting an implicit natural balance, the narrative that we're interfering with delicately balanced ecosystems, and that we need to not do that, in order to prevent the worst of climate breakdown. I'd never really thought of that as being concomitant with trying to preserve an unequal system.


@neil just come out of reading essays by McHarg & Bookchin so pretty high on the balanced ecology thing - McHarg especially talks about a general trend in evolution towards “syntropy” - organised rather than disorganised energy - his criticisms of urban planning etc stem mostly from the idea that the way humans disrupt ecosystems creates entropic environments — ones where energy is not diversely differentiated - he also puts forward this idea of environments doing “work” that benefits humans

@neil But that kinda spooks me - he’s talking about stuff like flood planes & marshes that if left untouched perform the “work” of preventing humanitarian disasters, or you know, plants producing oxygen so we can actually breathe and live - feels a lot like a way of making environmental protectionism parseable to commercial interests but also feel like its an idea that’s ripe for misuse

@neil The idea that preventing climate change is part and parcel with protecting an unequal system is fascinating - but seems naive to hope that its antecedent (allowing CC) would result in anything less equal :/ why I’m finding so interesting at the mo, though it’s also very prepper adjacent sometimes...

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